Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling [138]
It took Harry only five minutes to realize that his reputation as the best potion-maker in the class was crashing around his ears. Slughorn had peered hopefully into his cauldron on his first circuit of the dungeon, preparing to exclaim in delight as he usually did, and instead had withdrawn his head hastily, coughing, as the smell of bad eggs overwhelmed him. Hermione’s expression could not have been any smugger; she had loathed being outperformed in every Potions class. She was now decanting the mysteriously separated ingredients of her poison into ten different crystal phials. More to avoid watching this irritating sight than anything else, Harry bent over the Half-Blood Prince’s book and turned a few pages with unnecessary force.
And there it was, scrawled right across a long list of antidotes:
Harry stared at these words for a moment. Hadn’t he once, long ago, heard of bezoars? Hadn’t Snape mentioned them in their first-ever Potions lesson? “A stone taken from the stomach of a goat, which will protect from most poisons.”
It was not an answer to the Golpalott problem, and had Snape still been their teacher, Harry would not have dared do it, but this was a moment for desperate measures. He hastened toward the store cupboard and rummaged within it, pushing aside unicorn horns and tangles of dried herbs until he found, at the very back, a small cardboard box on which had been scribbled the word bezoars.
He opened the box just as Slughorn called, “Two minutes left, everyone!” Inside were half a dozen shriveled brown objects, looking more like dried-up kidneys than real stones. Harry seized one, put the box back in the cupboard, and hurried back to his cauldron.
“Time’s … UP!” called Slughorn genially. “Well, let’s see how you’ve done! Blaise … what have you got for me?”
Slowly, Slughorn moved around the room, examining the various antidotes. Nobody had finished the task, although Hermione was trying to cram a few more ingredients into her bottle before Slughorn reached her. Ron had given up completely, and was merely trying to avoid breathing in the putrid fumes issuing from his cauldron. Harry stood there waiting, the bezoar clutched in a slightly sweaty hand.
Slughorn reached their table last. He sniffed Ernie’s potion and passed on to Ron’s with a grimace. He did not linger over Ron’s cauldron, but backed away swiftly, retching slightly.
“And you, Harry,” he said. “What have you got to show me?”
Harry held out his hand, the bezoar sitting on his palm.
Slughorn looked down at it for a full ten seconds. Harry wondered, for a moment, whether he was going to shout at him. Then he threw back his head and roared with laughter.
“You’ve got nerve, boy!” he boomed, taking the bezoar and holding it up so that the class could see it. “Oh, you’re like your mother. … Well, I can’t fault you. … A bezoar would certainly act as an antidote to all these potions!”
Hermione, who was sweaty-faced and had soot on her nose, looked livid. Her half-finished antidote, comprising fifty-two ingredients, including a chunk of her own hair, bubbled sluggishly behind Slughorn, who had eyes for nobody but Harry.
“And you thought of a bezoar all by yourself, did you, Harry?” she asked through gritted teeth.
“That’s the individual spirit a real potion-maker needs!” said Slughorn happily, before Harry could reply. “Just like his mother, she had the same intuitive grasp of potion-making, it’s undoubtedly from Lily he gets it. … Yes, Harry, yes, if you’ve got a bezoar to hand, of course that would do the trick … although as they don’t work on everything, and are pretty rare, it’s still worth knowing how to mix antidotes. …”
The only person in the room looking angrier than Hermione was Malfoy, who, Harry was pleased to see, had spilled something that looked like cat-sick over himself. Before either of them could express their fury that Harry had come top of the class